Margaret O'Brien

She Might Be Your Child:
Margaret O'Brien is completely natural. That's why she captivates the
movie-goer.

By Helen Markel

The New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1944
pages 16 and 40

Hollywood.

An Army captain by the name of
Clark
Gable went to see a movie called "Lost Angel," about a child
wonder who rattled off Chinese and dabbled in the Napoleonic campaigns. The
child wonder was Margaret O'Brien.

The next day Captain Gable was
on the MGM lot and asked Miss O'Brien to
lunch with him. Miss O'Brien sent word back that she was sorry, she would like
to very much, but she was full.

The lady who turned down Clark
Gable is Hollywood's newest jackpot. (The boys who should know call her
"the hottest name on the MGM
lot.") She is seven-going-on-eight and having trouble with her teeth. They
drop out before her biggest scenes. She is exactly forty-four inches tall and
weighs an elfin forty-four.

She is no glamour girl. She has neither dimples nor curls. She likes her
hair plain and she braids it into two smooth brown pigtails. Her eyes are brown
too, and they take up most of her face when she gets excited. She doesn't look
like a Hollywood product. She looks like yours.

She can't sing. She can't dance. All she can do is act.

Even people who are allergic to child prodigies go to see her. Her appeal
lies in her naturalness. Her chief claim on audiences is that she causes them
either to want a child exactly like her to believe theirs is.

Margaret started out as a cover girl at the age of 3. Before she was 5 she
had made four transcontinental flights with her mother and her dancer aunt,
Marissa Flores, with whom Mrs. O'Brien used to dance before Margaret's birth in
Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 1937. Margaret's father died four months before she was
born.

She got into pictures by accident. Her mother had gone to see her sister's
agent and Margaret trailed along. The agent took one look at her and came up
with a bit part in "Babes on Broadway," in which Margaret foundered on
a sea of bedimpled darlings.

A year later, when she was 5, came "Journey for Margaret," which
stared the gold rush. Now the stories lined up for her will carry her through
the age of 88. The studio insists on "natural" stories. Anything that
Shirley Temple could have done is out.

It was during the filming of "Journey for Margaret" that she
decided to change her name. Up to then it had been Maxine. On the set everybody
called her Margaret. When the picture was finished she asked to have it legally
changed.

The judge who took care of it asked her what would happen if she should
play in a picture called "Tea for Susie."

"Nothing at all," said Margaret O'Brien soberly. "I just
know my name ought to be Margaret."

I visited her on the set of "Music for Millions," where she is
currently filching scenes from Jimmy Durante and José Iturbi. The scene in
progress was the wings of Carnegie Hall, where Margaret was supposed to be
watching her older sister get her first big break.

"You're so happy," the director, Henry Koster, was explaining to
her, "that you cry."

Margaret listened, her small body tense with concentration. She hesitated.

"Do you want the tears inside or out?" she asked.

It was Mr. Koster's turn to pause.

When she finished giving him her outside tears she came into her dressing
room to chat. It is a brand-new dressing room presented to her last month when
she became a star on the studio's twentieth anniversary. It has blue gingham
walls and a peppermint-striped ceiling. The thing Margaret likes best about it
is that it has a toilet which you don't know about until she tells you. It looks
more like a little blue closet.

"My last one," she explained in her prim little voice, "was
right out in the open. I used it in emergencies because it embrassed [sic] me.
This one nobody can tell about ‘less they're in on it."

Margaret's sketch book was lying on a peppermint-striped couch, open to a
crayon drawing of two girls running out of a house with a wildly smoking
chimney. Margaret picked it up and frowned at it.

"That's Judy Garland and me in ‘Meet
Me in St. Louis' (her last picture). They cut out that scene and I liked it so I
drew a picture to remember it. It's not very good."

Margaret does a great deal of painting.
Charles Laughton is so impressed
with it he has made a deal with her to get one picture a week. This is easy
since she is very prolific. There is one called "The Manger," which he
has framed in his dressing room.

She likes religious themes best. Many of her pictures show the bad man
laid low and the good man en route to heaven reeling in clouds lined with pink--
"the Virgin Mary's clouds," Margaret says proudly.

She started to paint a long time ago, she says-- when she was 5.

Margaret is a devout Catholic. She reads the funnies, but prefers Bible
stories, which she makes her mother read her by the hour. She cannot read by
herself yet. She learns her lines by having Mrs. O'Brien read the script aloud
twice, She has to memorize everybody else's lines too, so she will know her
cues.

She rarely "blows" her lines. Her powers of concentration
depress her colleagues. It was
Lionel Barrymore who said
despairingly, "If she had been born 200 years ago she'd have been burned at
the stake as a witch."

Margaret is allowed to work only four hours a day. A supervisor is
constantly on the set glaring at any interviewers who try to talk to her between
"takes," when she is supposed to be resting. Resting usually means an
involved game of "go fish" with her stand-in and "best-best"
friend, Carol Saunders, or playing hopscotch with the adoring grips.

Margaret is the hopscotch champion of Culver City. Carol isn't bad, she
says, but Guss-puss is better. Guss-puss is one of the electricians with a yen
for Margaret.

"What a woman!" Guss-puss says of The O'Brien, and then he
whistles admiringly through his teeth, an art which Margaret is trying vainly to
master.

"It's harder for me than for him, " she explains carefully,
"because his teeth are in to stay. Mine always seem to be hole-ly and they
let too much air in." Margaret's teeth are a great trial to her. They
finally put in a little bridge but her new ones keep pushing out.

Margaret excused herself to autograph her picture for the
pilot of a
Flying Fortress somewhere in the South Pacific who named his ship "Lost
Angel." She can't write, really, but she can print her name laboriously,
with her tongue between her teeth.

Mr. Durante and Miss O'Brien are the studio's newest twosome. Margaret
laughs at all of Jimmie's jokes and Jimmie advises Margaret on her hats. He has
written a song for her. He sits down at the piano and sings, "Margaret
O'Brien, I love you!" And Margaret, sitting beside him, goes "Mhhmm,
hmmmmh, mmhhmm." At the present writing they're working on new lyrics.

Margaret has a passion for hats. Some of them out-hedda Hopper. When she
walks around the lot, visiting sets and influencing people, she always wears
one, The one she likes best is a green Tyrolean pork-pie which sits on top of
her brown braids, and second comes her black prelate's hat which makes her look
like a small, earnest friar. She prefers them at a rakish angle, although her
mother has warned her.

She wears one to lunch everyday at the
MGM
commissary with her mother and her "Aunt Missa," who lives with them.
Sometimes she makes luncheon dates with
Van Johnson or Jimmie Craig or
Charles Laughton, to mention only
a few of the men in her life. Iturbi has asked her to lunch twice, but had to
cancel it at the last moment. The third time he asked her she turned him down.

"I just thought I'd better," she told her mother later.
"It's like a game, see? Next time he asks me I'll go."

Margaret lives with her mother and her Aunt Marissa in a small apartment.
She and her mother take the bus to the studio every morning. When they come home
at night Margaret plays jacks with the two little boys in the next apartment
while Mrs. O'Brien makes dinner. After dinner, Margaret helps with the dishes
and argues about staying up "just a little longer," but she says she
hardly ever wins. Her big night is Saturday, when she is allowed to "eat
out" with her Aunt Marissa and go to a movie, which she still considers the
best treat of all.

Mrs. O'Brien, like all mothers, regards her offspring with deep-rooted
affection, amusement and frequent astonishment. She is a completely normal,
intelligent little girl who thinks acting is great fun, whether it is on the set
or playing "dress-up" in her mother's clothes with the other kids on
the block.

When she saw herself first in "Journey for Margaret," she
thought she could have done better. In "Lost Angel" she thinks maybe
she improved a little, but that "Jimmie Craig was just wonderful."
Mister Craig is on top of her love-list at the moment, which is subject to
change without notice.

Her favorite actress is Jennifer
Jones. "She's a Fox star."
Margaret said anxiously, sliding her eyes around to the publicity woman who
looked unperturbed. Her favorite picture is "The Song of Bernadette."